Her Sisters Were Presented to the Duke—But He Asked About the Daughter They Overlooked

Chapter 9

There is a particular silence that comes into a room when a guest has just accused the host of something true. Wren had heard it twice before in her life. Once when Mr. Pike the steward had said, in front of the magistrate, that Ashmoor had not paid its last quarter’s accounts. Once when her mother had said, at a christening, that the child would never see his fourth winter.

This was worse.

“Forgotten?” Lord Ambrose’s smile held for one strange second, as though held up by a stick, then began to slip. “Your Grace, I—”

“The young woman behind the tea table.”

Lady Isobel’s fan stopped against her palm. Celeste looked at Verity. Verity looked at the piano. Blythe, with the instinct of a girl who has learned to read a room early, suddenly found the carpet of absorbing interest.

“Your Grace,” said Lord Ambrose, with an embarrassed little laugh, “she is merely our youngest.”

Atticus turned his head. He did it slowly, and there was nothing theatrical in it at all, which made it worse.

“Does being youngest,” he asked, “generally prevent a person from having a name?”

Wren stared down at the silver spoon beside her right hand. In its bowl she could see a small, warped version of herself, and she watched it instead of the room, because she was not entirely sure she could hold her face together if she looked up.

Her father’s silence was heavier than anger would have been.

“Of course not.” He cleared his throat. “That is Wren.”

The Duke waited.

Lord Ambrose’s jaw tightened, once. “Wren Ashby.”

Only then did Atticus Vale look satisfied. He crossed the carpet — three steps, unhurried — and stood in front of her, close enough that she had to lift her chin.

“Miss Ashby.”

Wren had technically been introduced to gentlemen before. It had always happened near the end of a sentence, while someone was already turning away — and this is Wren, of course, you must meet my daughters — an introduction by accident, an afterthought with a name attached. She had never in her life been given the whole room, all of it, everyone waiting, with nothing to do but hear what she was called.

She stepped out from behind the table. She curtsied.

“Your Grace.”

“There,” said Atticus. “Now everyone is properly assembled.”

Verity’s lips parted, then closed on nothing. Celeste’s smile turned brittle as sugar. Lady Isobel looked at her husband with an expression Wren could not read and would think about for months afterward.

Lord Ambrose immediately, loudly, announced dinner.

The dining room offered no relief.

Wren discovered her place at the far end of the table, wedged between Aunt Constance, who was very deaf, and a cousin who spoke almost exclusively about horses and appeared to have brought his own. It should have been invisible. It should have been exactly where she had always been put.

Instead she became aware, with the acuity of a woman who had spent her life reading rooms for danger, of every single moment the Duke’s attention travelled down the length of the table like a slow light.

Celeste talked about London. Verity talked about Italian music. Blythe, from two seats away, asked whether Thornbury hosted large summer parties, and received an answer so mild that even she could not make a meal of it.

Then Lord Ambrose began speaking about the estate.

“Ashmoor land has been remarkably productive this year,” he said, to the table at large and to the Duke in particular. “Especially the southern farms.”

Wren’s fork paused.

She caught it before it made a sound. She put it down beside her plate and reached for her wine instead, and looked at the tablecloth, and hoped.

“Has it?” Atticus asked.

“Exceptionally.” Her father lifted his glass.

Wren looked at her plate.

The southern farms had lost nearly a third of their winter wheat in October when the drainage channels collapsed. She knew, because she had spent three mornings that autumn calculating exactly how long the Beckett family and the four households behind them could manage before rent relief became unavoidable, and she had been the one to write the letters granting the delay, and the one to move the shortfall into the northern account where her father would not see it before Christmas.

“Miss Ashby.”

It was the Duke’s voice, crossing the table.

She looked up. Faces all along the table turned toward her.

“Your Grace.”

“You appear unconvinced.”

Her father’s hand tightened around his glass. “Wren takes no interest in agricultural matters.”

Atticus’s eyes stayed on hers. “Do you?”

Every instinct Wren had told her to retreat — to lower her eyes, to say no, Your Grace, to become the furniture again. Her father was looking at her. Her mother was looking at her. The whole table was a row of little mouths waiting to be fed the correct answer.

“I have an interest,” she said, “in whether people eat.”

Aunt Constance leaned close, hand cupped to her ear. “What did she say?”

Wren nearly smiled.

Atticus Vale smiled.

“A practical interest,” he said.

Lord Ambrose cut in before the moment could settle. “My daughter concerns herself with household charities. Among other things.”

“Among other things,” Wren said, softly, into her wine.

Her father’s eyes found hers down the length of the table — a warning, flat and old and entirely familiar — and this time she did lower her gaze.

Dinner continued. The Duke asked no more questions about the estate, and the restraint told Wren more than curiosity would have. A man who wanted to humiliate her father would have kept pressing. Atticus Vale stopped, and in stopping he told her that whatever was happening in his head had already moved somewhere private.

At the end of the meal the ladies withdrew toward the drawing room. Wren, instead, slipped out through the service door beside the pantry.

She had a basket to pack.